Armageddon
by The Exile
Summary: When a large army of Alarm Eggs appear in their dream and destroy its very fabric while they are still inside it, Claris and Elliot are caught up in an event that could destroy Nightopia, the Nightmare Realm and the entire world. AU, post-NiD, pre-JoD, potential spoilers.
1. Chapter 1

Elliot half-heartedly bounced a basketball across the well-kept lawn that surrounded the Twin Seeds Plaza Fountain. He had lost interest in basketball practice half an hour ago and was now just doing something to pass the time. Every now and then, he glanced up at the ponderous old face of the Town Hall clock, then glanced down at his mobile phone. Still no messages. She was still late.

Unless, of course, he had lost count of time and failed to maintain an accurate representation of a timepiece within the dream he was shaping. It was hard to shape a dream on his own that was meant to be a shared dream for two. That was, after all, the idea of this dream; a sandbox world to host a tutorial for a beginning lucid dreamer. Their home town, particularly the Plaza where they met up every day after school and stayed until it went dark, was a backdrop familiar enough for them both to maintain easily so they could focus on altering small details. Shaping the world would come next, once they had mastered the art of shaping objects. Since travelling to Nightopia, freeing NiGHTs and defeating Wizeman, they had been honing their gift whenever they could. Most nights they could easily reach a lucid state and hold onto a dream long after they would naturally have woken up. Their success rate at sharing dreams and shaping their environment in a dream was steadily growing. They couldn't yet return to any part Nightopia though, and they had never met NiGHTs. They had a feeling the jester was watching them – and probably laughing at their attempts like an adult watching small children pretending to be adults – but they guessed they wouldn't be shown the way to Nightopia again unless they genuinely learnt enough to find it by themselves or there was another dire need.

The Town Hall bells tolled and Claris appeared behind him, arms folded straight out behind her back, smiling sweetly and blushing like she always did when she knew she was going to have to apologise about something.

"Sorry I'm late," she said, "I fell asleep. I forgot it was Friday."

While they practiced whenever they could, it was less restful to manipulate sleep than to allow sleep to take its natural course, so they tended to do so only when they knew they wouldn't have to do anything that required being wide awake and alert the next day, and they didn't practice two days in a row. Elliot guessed that Claris had been practising on her own when she should have been getting rest. No doubt, the tolling bells were her work too. They weren't his.

"Get some rest if you're too tired to practice," said Elliot for what felt like the twentieth time this week, "It's not a competition. We're supposed to be doing this in tandem. If you exhaust yourself all the time by working too hard, your rhythm will go out of whack and you won't be able to lucid dream at all."

"You wouldn't even have noticed if I'd done it right," she frowned but sat down beside him anyway, on the bench facing the fountain, "I'll get it right, next time. I was going to surprise you at the new technique I've been working on."

"You don't need to work overtime, you know. You're not behind me, you're way ahead of me."

"I never said I was behind," she replied, "Why, is there some reason someone would think I was behind?"

Elliot sighed. He wondered if she was like this all the time at school, too. If she was as good at other subjects as she was at art and drama, she was probably one of those scary workaholics that shut themselves in their rooms whenever they had exams.

"Can you at least make the bells shut up now?" he asked, "It's struck way more than twelve. Since when did the Town Hall have a twenty four hour clock?"

"I thought it was you doing the bells!"

"Um... it's not you? Oh, great, so either one of us is changing things and not even realising it, or we're losing control of the..."

The clock bells abruptly stopped mid-toll, dead silent, in a way that real bells couldn't do. It didn't even sound like they had been muffled or caught in something, it was more like a recording of some bells had been playing on a machine and there had been a sudden power cut. The silence was more audible than the bells. It sounded like fundamental wrongness, like an omission of something that had always been there, like looking up at the night sky and finding that the moon and stars were gone – not obscured by clouds, but clearly gone.

Then the ringing began, a continuous, frantic high-pitched noise that grew steadily louder.

They knew that sound. They remembered it from Nightopia and they knew to start running when they heard it. The noise getting louder meant the cause of the noise was getting closer to them. Letting it catch them was a bad idea. They bolted to the other end of the fountain, climbed up onto an overhanging waterfall feature and hid inside the grate where the water came out. Those things didn't look up as often as they looked down or around them in a circle. Their spotlights didn't swivel up very easily.

It took Elliot a few seconds to wonder what the hell an Alarm Egg was doing in their dream. They hadn't heard anything from Nightopia or NiGHTs for five years. They hadn't seen a Nightmaren and didn't have the vivid nightmares that their enemies brought with them. Absolutely nothing life-threatening had happened in their dreams except that once dream about Claris that she had caught Elliot having once, and she hadn't really meant it when she said she was standing over him with a kitchen knife while he was asleep and that he would never wake up. Now, without warning, Wizeman's watchdog was prowling around in their dreams again. He wondered if he should summon his Red Ideya. It might protect him or it might just alert the horrid thing to his presence. He wasn't even sure if the Alarm Egg could be affected by the Ideya like the Nightmaren were. NiGHTs had told him not to try and fight them. When you heard the ringing, you ran for it, especially if you were out of time. Running out of time drew them to you. And you never, ever, succumbed to the temptation to wake up, no matter how scared you were.

"Elliot..." whispered Claris, her voice shaking. She was shaking, too, so he put his arm around her. He wasn't sure if that was helping or not. He put a finger to his lips but she ignored him, "Elliot, there's more than one. There's lots of them, all around!"

He listened more closely. Then he realised why the noise was growing so loud. He assumed the Alarm Egg was somewhere very close by and was hiding itself well. Now he could tell that there were hundreds upon hundreds of individual rings, synchronised without so much as a millisecond's lag. A perfectly co-ordinated army, moving as one. And he could tell from where the noise was coming from that they were surrounding him.

"They're moving very slowly. We might still have time..." he began.

"To do what? We can't wake up! You know we mustn't wake up!" she hissed, her voice coming dangerously close to a panic.

"Maybe they haven't seen us yet."

"What else would they be looking for apart from us? There's nothing here!"

"If they'd seen us, they would rush straight for us. Maybe if we stay really still..."

Suddenly, Claris gasped, narrowly suppressing a scream, and pointed straight ahead. The front line of the first wave of Alarm Eggs was visible, as co-ordinated as they feared. And they weren't looking for a dreamer at all; they were deliberately, methodically, destroying the dreamscape. The lights embedded in their faces were solid and glowing like laser beams instead of the dim light of the searchlights and tractor beams they used to capture the Ideya of a dreamer before forcing them to wake up. Everything those lights touched, they cut through, tearing apart the background so that it fell apart, leaving behind a stark, glaring whiteness. Elliot could tell as sure as he knew when a light bulb had burned out that the dreamscape could never be repaired.

The exits had already been destroyed, all of them at once. Elliot held Claris tighter but it was more for his own reassurance than hers.

Then, suddenly, a flute played, one clarion note that drowned out all the infernal ringing for a brief second. By that time, both Claris and Elliot had been hoisted into the air by a pair of strong but slender hands. They hurtled directly upwards at a dizzying speed.

"Those things never look up," commented a completely genderless and rather mischievous voice, then they were dragged out of the dream – not into the harsh light of awakening, but further into the soft, warm darkness that contained the roiling chaos of raw, unformed dreams.

* * *

As he swooped low over the pale, silent ruins, like shadows burned into a whitewashed wall, Reala saw the true extent of the damage that had been done overnight to an entire Mare. It didn't mean he could quite believe it. It was everything that had been reported to him and worse. An entire invading army of Nightmaren couldn't have caused that kind of widespread destruction in such a small space of time. No correctly functioning Nightmaren would have tried to damage a system so utterly beyond repair, even one that belonged to the enemy and couldn't be taken.

It looked more like a natural disaster than an invasion. If Reala hadn't already been to three systems affected in the same way this morning, and been attacked in two of them by a force that hadn't quite finished escaping through the jagged rents in the very fabric of the dreamscape, all life and colour drained out of them as though someone had turned off a monitor by throwing a brick through the screen, that they created when they appeared, he would never have believed that the carnage was the work of an invading force.

He used the term 'invading' loosely. They didn't stop to capture territory and didn't target important military installations. Although they went instinctively after sentient life forms, they immediately drained their personal timeline (The things ate time; Reala had seen them go into a feeding frenzy over the crystallised deposits of time that collected in Mares where the difference between dream time and real time was unusually great) and then forcibly awakened them, as though they were an enemy resource to slash and burn. Their only motive seemed to be causing as much devastation as possible whilst advancing inexorably towards wherever it was that they were going. Reala had been sent to follow them and find out where they were headed by observing the pattern of the Mares they destroyed. It had been NiGHTs' job but Reala's faulty twin had failed. Reala wasn't sure whether to be insulted that his Lord Wizeman had asked NiGHTs first and himself second, even though he was clearly the superior, or to gloat over NiGHTs' failure where he, of course, would easily succeed. Not that he would ever disrespect Lord Wizeman by showing any reaction to an order other than immediate obedience.

He could tell at first glance that the entire Mare was damaged beyond repair, just like the last three had been. There were different degrees of damage that could be done to a Mare. Superficial damage to the 'furnishings' of a dream, the appearance that a dreamer would perceive while they were dreaming, could be repaired instantly by any Nightmaren with powers of illusionary magic. Structural damage to the underlying, permanent shape of a dream would require a team of Nightmaren to physically repair it with duct tape and telekinesis. Then there was this kind of damage. Decay to the underlying laws of nature in a dreamscape, its very essence. If it was a computer program, its code would have been deleted, overwritten by garbled nonsense. An area hit by that kind of damage could not be rebuilt. Some areas hadn't been accessible, or even readable by any sense that a Nightmaren possessed, when Reala tried to enter them to assess the damage. When he did step inside one, he ran the risk that the idea of flight had been deleted and he would fall straight into an endless void. Eventually, the Mare would collapse in on itself and disappear from the dreamlands.

Lord Wizeman would be furious at the loss. He would order the Mare quarantined and the defences around the neighbouring Mares tightened even further, if it was possible for security to be more paranoid these days. So far, the invaders hadn't been able to get into most of the larger populated Mares. They were waiting for someone to forget to close the door behind them fast enough, or until they grew strong enough to force the doors open for themselves, or they simply weren't interested in those sectors yet. The Nightmaren were besieged, surrounded by an enemy that could destroy their very souls and who showed infinite patience.

One good thing about this enemy; they could be destroyed in return. In the last system, Reala had spotted an Alarm Egg disappearing into a rift that had opened up in the spot where it shone its searchlight, completely replacing that spot. He drill-dashed towards it before it could swivel its face to shine the lethal searchlight in his direction. Its ringing was silenced forever as it exploded in a shower of cogs, springs and glass. Then he had accidentally brushed his hand against the rift when he was shoving off against the ground to bounce himself back into the air. He had lost three fingers on that hand. Lord Wizeman, who had built Reala using his own magic, couldn't regenerate the fingers.

This Mare had long been abandoned by both the invaders and the surviving inhabitants who had, usefully for Lord Wizeman, managed to escape and lock the gate behind them. There was nothing Reala could do except note that they were still surrounded and outnumbered, then head back to face the inevitable report. Of the many things he wanted to do, including stick his remaining fingers inside more portals, being the bearer of bad news to Lord Wizeman was at the bottom of his list. He wondered if bribing NiGHTs to do it for him was an option.


	2. Chapter 2

"What's going on here?" demanded Elliot as soon as NiGHTs had placed him on the floor. He was grateful to be on solid ground that wasn't rapidly disintegrating under the death lasers of evil alarm clocks, until he tried moving, and discovered that he was in Soft Museum Park. Claris helped him stand up again.

"Ssh, I'm concentrating. I've got to lock the door tight," said NiGHTs. He stared up at what looked like empty night sky. As Elliot looked close, he saw dark shapes like huge padlocks and chains that held shut a solid wooden gate that fit across the entirety of Soft Museum's dream counterpart. As NiGHTs closed his eyes and concentrated hard, the locks all snapped shut and the chains tightened. After a few minutes, he turned around and said, "Security's important these days. Those things come in if you don't lock the door. As you see, they wreck everything. Locking the door is as simple as dreaming it shut, but people forget all the time."

"I'm sorry if we caused trouble," Elliot said, "Nobody told us."

"It's okay. If I can't find a way to keep public dreams safe, I can't blame dreamers for needing to come into high-security regions of Nightopia," NiGHTs frowned, "I tried to put a firewall around a public dream, but then dreamers couldn't get in, and the second time I tried it, I locked myself out of public dreamspace. To be honest, that's why I haven't been able to visit you."

"How long has this been going on?" demanded Claris, "Do they do that to dreamers as well as dreams? We're here now, and you look like you need a lot of help!"

"I'll explain in a moment, we need to keep moving," said NiGHTs. He began flying towards the entrance to the Maze of Mirrors. That place confused Elliot even when he was awake and it was the real thing, never mind when it followed no laws of logic and could shift into any shape it wanted and usually did when he thought about it too hard. This time round it was dark and silent, and there were signs everywhere that said 'Closed for Maintenance'. A chill ran down his spine at the disconcerting effect. He hoped it was just his own unconscious mind, still rattled by his experiences in the dream he had just fled. NiGHTs completely ignored the signs as he did any law, whether of the legal or scientific variety, that was in his path, and began talking again. The noise broke the silence like a sledgehammer.

"You have to understand that this enemy isn't the same. If Wizeman was attacking again, I'd ask you to help me fight him straight away. These things will attack Nightmaren. I've even seen them destroy a second class Nightmaren. To be honest, I don't know why this started happening. I'm still trying to find out what's happening. Up until now, you only ever saw one or two Alarm Eggs in one system and they were only dangerous if they cornered a dreamer. I thought they were under Wizeman's control and they would go away when Wizeman was defeated. Now... it's like they've suddenly decided to get together and destroy everything!"

"Like the whole world ran out of time at once," muttered Elliot, staring at his own reflection in a mirror. It was one of the comedy mirrors that made you look stretched out so you were short and fat or tall and thin or swirly like a kaleidoscope. In the dim lighting, the distorted grimace of his own misshapen head looked faintly menacing. He felt as though his reflection was parroting his words as if in mockery, "You know, the world was supposed to end last year, but it didn't. I'm not really sure why or how, it was just supposed to, because it was 2012. Maybe it ran out of time, and so the Alarm Eggs came for it. You'd need a lot of Eggs for an entire world."

"Don't you dare talk like that! Of course the world's not going to end!" yelled Claris, "We're going to help NiGHTs fight the Alarm Eggs, and we're going to win! You can't stop us from joining in this fight. It's our fight too - what will happen to humanity if these things take over Nightopia? Will they come after us next, or will they just take away our ability to dream and watch us go mad? They're worse than Wizeman ever was - at least he just wanted to take control of everything!"

"I'm not even confident we can fight the Alarm Eggs," said NiGHTs, "They can be hurt if you hit them hard enough, but they hunt in huge packs and they destroy anything they touch. There's only three of us. We can't trust the Nightmaren to help us, even if we have a common enemy."

"They must have a leader. They were moving like an organised army," said Elliot.

"I've never seen a leader, if there is one. I don't know where their base of operations is and I can't get close enough to find out," said NiGHTs, "They're coming from somewhere else. A place outside the dreamlands. I can't follow them back through the portals they make. Things are destroyed when they touch the portals. I don't even know if it's just the portals that I can't pass through or if the place on the other end is dangerous as well."

"We need to find out exactly what these Alarm Eggs are, if they're not Wizeman's creations," said Claris.

"Like I said, I've been trying my best to find out about them, but... er, there's a slight problem," said NiGHTs, "I can't get in to the place where you find out about things. It's a very important place in Nightopia and security is even tighter there."

"You'd think the savior of Nightopia wouldn't have so much trouble being let into places in Nightopia!" commented Claris.

"Yeah, that's exactly what I keep saying, but dream security systems don't have a sense of humour," said NiGHTs, floating upside down and making a face at himself. He had been acting his usual self even though their conversation had grown increasingly grim and their surroundings more oppressive. His behaviour was comforting, the only thing familiar in this changed world, and it helped Elliot fight back the rising panic that was threatening to engulf him. He wondered if the jester was deliberately trying to raise their spirits or if, as an ex-Nightmaren, he was literally unable to feel fear. When NiGHTs suddenly hung still in the air, a confused and worried expression on his face, while staring wide-eyed at his reflection, Elliot started and looked at straight at him, then at the reflection.

The NiGHTs in the mirror did not look like NiGHTs. It was only subtly different, in a way that suggested it wasn't being altered by the extreme curve of the mirror or by NiGHTs' childishly blunt imagination. The colouring on his horns had changed to a dark purple with blue stripes, his skin looked a shade darker and faintly yellow and his eyes were a feline bright yellow. The NiGHTs in the mirror looked like he was slightly frayed around the edges. He had a coarse, unfinished look about him. The two of them hung motionless but Elliot could tell that the reflection was only still by coincedence, they were not mirroring each other.

NiGHTs reached a hand towards the mirror...

* * *

"I have decided not to punish you for now. Your honesty in reporting your failure pleases me, and you are too useful to me intact," Wizeman told Reala, who mentally breathed a sigh of relief.

"I am unworthy of your benevolence, Lord Wizeman," said Reala, bowing as low he could manage in mid-air.

"I have no use for sycophants. Leave now and be back about your mission before I decide to agree with you," ordered Wizeman. He snapped one of his hands and a portal of dark chaos opened in the direction where the eye set in its palm gazed; just above the ornately engraved number twelve in the face of the exact parody of Twin Seeds clock tower, around which untamed elements raged and antediluvian wisdom was inscribed on stone tablets. Reala shot through the portal as fast as physically possible. The eye blinked and the portal was gone.

Now that his subordinates were not watching, the Lord of Nightmare could resume his original train of thought without the worry that an observant and ambitious First-Class Nightmaren, who may or may not also be malfunctioning, might pick up on the momentary sign of weakness. Of course, it was not weakness to worry about a situation that was entirely new to you, that threatened your entire realm and everyone under your command, and that you could see no way to resolve.

Of course, he probably had encountered the situation before and he might even know the solution. That information wasn't his to use. He caught sight of one of the stone tablets as it spun past the arched window of the domed spire, its shape illuminated by an atmospheric crackle of lightning. It, too, only held the appearance of the original. The information contained within it was only his own notes made fairly recently, only within the last century or so. It contained plans for the most recent generation of Nightmaren and the Mares he had built for them using the sectors of the dreamlands he had most recently captured. A lot of that would need to be crossed off now. _So much progress lost..._

**Save your progress? Y/N.**

All his hand-eyes winced at once and the expression on his mask became a tight grimace. A burst of intense, uncontrollable irritation caused him to throw a volley of fireballs across his throne room. They were swallowed by darkness; nothing existed in here that he couldn't remake in an instant if he did manage to set it on fire. The sky darkened and the lightning storms and tornadoes flared up in response to their creator's mood.

He had not heard the messages for thousands of years. This was not a useful time for them to come back. In fact, this was the worst possible time to be distracted by meaningless echoes of a time long past, an entity that he used to be and that he could not and would not become again. He wished he still had that knowledge and the power to do something with it, but it came with too great a price - servitude to the ones who gave it to him, and who would doubtless not allow him to do anything useful with it anyway, incompetent as they were. He was a master of his own realm, now, not a servant of another. He did not get constant messages running through his head that said things like **Saving automatically in 30 seconds****. All dreamlands systems should save every ten minutes to prepare for scheduled shutdown.**

Snapping all six fingers at once, he recalled Reala, along with his other five most trusted Generals, summoning them directly before him rather than sending a message requesting their presence, despite the lack of dignity the act conveyed. At least it told them that the matter was urgent and that he was in the sort of mood where he would use the full extent of his power without regard for anyone or anything.

"We are setting off for Twin Seeds immediately. I am accompanying you in person. You will guard me at all costs. The Bellbridge elite division will protect Headquarters in my absence," he casually sent the message to Queen Bella over an instant, flawless telepathic link. Then he disappeared.


	3. Chapter 3

"NiGHTs!"

The jester flinched as he was shaken back into full consciousness by Elliot.

"What's got into you? Did you doze off?" the boy asked, inspecting NiGHTs as though he had sprouted three heads, "Can you even sleep, anyway? I've always wondered what you do to recharge your batteries!"

"No, I have not been... sleeping..." said NiGHTs, shaking his head and blinking as if dusting cobwebs from his mind.

"Can we get out of here now?" asked Claris, who was staring pointedly down the middle of the corridor in an effort to avoid looking into any of the mirrors. It didn't work very well, as there were mirrors at the end of the corridor too, "This place doesn't feel right."

"Well, it probably isn't," said NiGHTs, looking around nervously, "Jackle lives here. He's not exactly right in the head, even for a Nightmaren. I don't think he's there now – I think Wizeman ordered him to the front lines with the others – but I agree, we need to not stick around any longer."

"Where are we going, then?" asked Elliot.

"The Twin Seeds Building," said NiGHTs, "Or, at least, the part of Nightopia that looks like it. I was thinking about it for a while, but I can't work out why you all live in a city that looks exactly like Central Nightopia. Maybe your town's architect was mad."

"Twin Seeds- isn't that where Wizeman lives?" asked Claris.

"No. Well, yes, but he just lives in a small part of it. He's kind of in exile. Except you don't usually get exiled to somewhere right next to where you live. I think they still wanted to keep a close eye on him," said NiGHTs, looking a little confused at his own words.

"Who's 'they'?"

"Nobody," said NiGHTs firmly, "It doesn't matter. We can get information from the Town Hall, and all that matters is that we get the information we need!"

"My mum always said you should go to the Town Hall if you want to know something or to speak to someone in charge," Claris told him, "Is that who 'they' are? The people in charge of Nightopia?"

"Nobody's in charge of Nightopia any more," said NiGHTs.

"So, someone was?"

"We won't find them," said NiGHTs, before darting down the corridor. They ran after him until they reached a room where several of the mirrors had been shattered. Glass shards covered the floor and an entire half of the room had been cordoned off with police tape and signs saying 'danger' and 'no admittance' and 'under repair'. One of the mirrors had a huge, spreading crack down the middle but hadn't shattered yet. White light streamed out from it, even though Elliot knew that all the illusions in Soft Museum were done with real mirrors and none of it was computer generated.

"Don't look too closely at that if you like having eyes," NiGHTs warned him. He had bent down to pick through the glass on the floor until he was almost touching the ground, something Elliot had always believed the jester incapable of doing.

"Are you sure you're okay? You're not acting like usual," said Elliot, "The mirror was weirder than the others."

"I told you, I don't like it here either," said NiGHTs, even though he had been fine seconds before looking at the mirror. _Maybe the mirror freaked him out too, _thought Elliot. After a few seconds of inspection, NiGHTs reported, "The Alarm Eggs did this. I think they went this way. Normally I wouldn't do something as suicidal as following them but it's our only way into Twin Seeds. The security might still be weak, and if it isn't, they'll be attacking Twin Seeds. We can materialise a little outside the dream and sneak in through one of their lines of fire. Yes, that's suicidal as well, but it's better than not being able to do anything at all!"

"You must really want to see the Dream Mayor," said Claris.

"I told you, there isn't a Dream Mayor..." said NiGHTs, then he shook his head, "I'd really like to leave them a complaint, though!"

"How about leaving the complaint with the Alarm Eggs?" suggested Elliot.

"Don't worry, I've got enough complaint slips to go round," said NiGHTs, grinning as he grabbed the two of them and flew through the broken mirror. Claris fully expected this to kill her, and was pleasantly surprised when she reappeared to find herself lying on a grassy bank in the dead of night in the rain, just outside the walled courtyard of the Twin Seeds Building.

She was less relieved when she realised that it had become a war zone.

* * *

Nightopia's vision of Twin Seeds, it had turned into a fortress. The town's inner suburbs had sprouted twenty-foot walls lined with laser turrets, aerial defense drones, also mounted with Gatling lasers, the streets had been rearranged into a labyrinthine maze and stretched inwards and upwards so that a flying intruder would still have to navigate them while being pursued by the drones. Closer to the Clock Tower, the entire garden was a spider's web of laser beams. A force field that looked like a lattice of rainbow energy – she recognised it as Ideya energy – surrounded the entire town, and what like like the entirety of the Alarm Egg forces, thousands of Egg Clocks led by their ghostly commanders, were trying to tear it down by dragging sections of it into their realm. Occasionally one of them would manage to make a hole large enough to fit themselves through, at which point they were immediately fired upon by one of the drones that patrolled the perimeter or the laser turrets on the ramparts of the Tower. Nightmaren would also appear and attack the Awakers, usually ambushing them before they even arrived at the walls, laying a trap baited with their own supply of the crystallised pieces of time.

"They normally bait dreamers with those things," NiGHTs told her, "The poor kids think they can get a few extra minutes in their dream, then the Nightmaren pounce. Don't make the mistake of thinking they're on your side because you have a common enemy."

"There are so many of them," Elliot whistled, "How are we going to get past them?"

"We sneak past the ones that are too busy trying to get inside and not get killed by Nightmaren."

"They can make portals, can't they? Why don't they just throw a portal through one of the gaps?"

"The energy given off by force field probably stops them doing that. Or they haven't thought of it yet. Let's not give them the idea," said NiGHTs.

"And how are we going to get through the barrier?" asked Claris.

"Oh... like this!" said NiGHTs, grabbing them by the arms and drill-dashing as fast as he could towards the most recent breach in the force field. Dozens of lethal laser beams trained upon the ex-Nightmaren but he was too fast for them, and as the alarm clocks rolled towards him, ringing frantically, he smashed a hole straight through the four of them that were between him and the tear. The more alert of them started to pour in after him, and soon he found himself in-between several angry security drones and an invading army. He darted out of the way of the first wave of lasers, watching in satisfaction as they hit the nearest Awaker in the face, then two of the Clocks that followed it through collapsed in a shower of gears as they were grabbed by their keys and dragged ringing into the air by the two children before being dropped from a great height, unable to steer with their keys removed. After muscle memory took over, they soon re-learned how to fight in Nightopia while dualised with NiGHTs. It was like fighting an ordinary nightmare; you imagined that you could fight it, that the situation was under your control, and it was.

They sped through the side-streets of inner-city Twin Seeds, feeling rather guilty when NiGHTs was forced to smash straight into a security drone to stop it shooting at them. The automated systems clearly could not tell friend from foe. Elliot guessed that they thought NiGHTs was a Nightmaren under Wizeman's control, or possibly they were simply programmed to fire at all unauthorised intruders. At least the laser turrets hadn't tracked them down, or possibly couldn't fire at them in the narrow, winding streets without damaging their own buildings. After five minutes of running, Elliot heard deranged cackling from the rooftops, and when he looked up, he saw why they weren't being targeted: a figure that looked a little like NiGHTs, except that it was only a disembodied head, cloak and pair of arms, was throwing a constant volley of razor-sharp playing cards at the turrets while ducking and weaving through their answering fire.

"Jackle! Don't let him see you!" whispered NiGHTs, swooping low to the ground even though it meant veering dangerously close to an anti-air laser.

The maze wasn't endless, only long and confusing, and they were able to navigate by watching where Jackle was flying whenever he tried to communicate to an unseen but presumably existing Reala by screeching at the top of his voice. They soon found themselves in the courtyard, where they ran across the lawn. NiGHTs gazed thoughtfully up at the laser wire mesh.

"I'll go in ahead. I can deactivate the barrier once I'm inside. Don't follow me, okay? It's going to be a tight squeeze!" said NiGHTs. Then he tilted his head, flashed the clock face a grin full of sharp teeth and darted forwards, ducking and weaving through the laser mesh without taking a single hit. Then he hovered just above the ledge, arms folded.

"Hey, no playing around! Don't just leave us here in the middle of a war zone!" complained Elliot. Claris was looking up at Clawz, who was jumping from one lamp post to another, pouncing on the Alarm Eggs as they floated past and tearing out their insides while his exploding mice flew around him. The cat-demon noticed her and drew back his teeth in a snarl.

"How dare you intrude upon my territory!" Wizeman's voice boomed as he materialised in front of the clock face. Claris and Elliot tried to run and hide underneath a bench but they found themselves being grabbed from behind and lifted up into the air by Reala, who had appeared behind them entirely without being noticed.

"I am the only one fighting a threat to all of Nightopia, the Clock Tower refuses to aid me, and now you refuse to recognise your rightful allegiance! You are a coward, a traitor and a faulty machine, NiGHTs! If you do not surrender, your precious dreamers will be killed by your own brother!" announced the Lord of Nightmare. To add emphasis to his master's words, Reala extended his claws until they stopped inches from Claris and Elliot's throats.

NiGHTs stuck his tongue out at Wizeman, hands on hips, "You think that's my brother? You think I am the faulty one? I, of all people? I pity you, Lord of Nightmare – you are still using inferior copies of me, when you could have had the real thing!"

"That's not NiGHTs..." whispered Reala to himself. Elliot felt the Nightmaren's grip relax and realised that his attention was no longer fully on his captive. He wondered whether it would be a good time to try escaping. He was more worried about NiGHTs, right now. If something worried Reala, it was serious, and Elliot remembered his shock at seeing the other NiGHTs in the mirror. He should have paid more attention to the jester's strange behaviour after the incident.

"You have been lied to, Lord Wizeman!" continued the voice that was now clearly not that of the NiGHTs they knew. It had a flat quality to it and it crackled with static, as though it was coming from something that was very far away and needed a lot of fixing, "Everyone in Nightopia has been lied to! Nightopia is a lie, a place of sorcery and enchantments, people forcing their will on the world and bending reality to their whim! But do not worry – soon, only the pure truth will remain!"

"Do you mean the Awakers? NiGHTs, you can't be insane enough to be working for them! Do you realise that they will wipe all life from the Universe?"

"Life, light, colour, sound and thought... all that exists in the eye of the beholder... but this Universe will be free of the tyranny of a beholder!" said NiGHTs, sweeping back his arms theatrically, "Do you know what the people of this Universe have done to me, Lord Wizeman? Do you know what lie they have told me? They told me I could exist in the next dream! Dream after dream, they told me this, and still I do not appear in the dreams!"

"Yes, yes, I remember who you are, now, and you..." Wizeman's voice became quieter and more dangerous, "You do not have permission to exist!"

"Then you should have erased me entirely and irrevocably while you had the chance," came the reply, "It is too late, now. You had your last chance. This world has had more dreams than it deserves. Now it is time to WAKE UP!"

The figure that was not NiGHTs went instantly from a complete stop to a full speed drill-dash towards Wizeman. The Lord of Nightmare threw a shield around himself and made a grab for NiGHTs with three of his hands. The move had been a feint and, with unreadable speed and accuracy beyond anything Claris and Elliot had seen him perform before, NiGHTs darted to one side and flew straight past Wizeman towards the clock face. It shattered like glass where the '12' had been, then the jester disappeared into the machinery.


	4. Chapter 4

Reala looked up at the clock face, then to his master, torn between the instincts to chase the false NiGHTs, guard the prisoners and wait for orders. Elliot took this moment to concentrate hard on the fabric of the dream, as though it were just the sandbox dream he shared with Claris, and summon a basketball that shot out of the air towards Reala's head. He swiped it out of the way, tearing it into shreds with his sharp claws, but dropped both his captives in the act of preventing the ball from hitting him in the face.

"Jackle, Clawz, after him!" ordered Wizeman, "Reala, recapture the prisoners! Everyone else, hold defensive positions!"

"Run!" whispered Elliot, grabbing Claris' hand. They both instinctively began flying. While it wasn't graceful, more like a series of large bounds, without the help of NiGHTs, they would not fall to their deaths.

"Run where?" hissed Claris, "After the pretend NiGHTs that wants to end the world?"

"No! I don't know... just, away from here!"

"And let a pretend NiGHTs end the world? You really don't have a plan, do you?" she rolled her eyes, let go of Elliot's hand, then turned around. Before Elliot could protest, she had caught up with the rapidly pursuing Reala.

"At least let us talk to Wizeman, okay? We could be useful! If the real NiGHTs is out there..."

"Naive children. I could not care less if my brother is alive or dead, and as for Wizeman, I have never known him to bother taking prisoners. Maybe he still intends to use you as a hostage, or maybe we are running low on fuel. Why don't we wait and see, eh?" A sharp-toothed grin spread over his face.

Then, suddenly, the ground began to shake violently, then a crack tore apart the entire floor from the beginning of the shield to the sector's entrance, swallowing both armies, trees, mountains. Sickly, blinding white light began to pour from the crack, immolating anything it touched with ivory flames. Then the rumbling grew more intense as something rose from the fissure, something that vibrated and made a deafening ringing noise as it emerged in its cradle of wires, slightly sunk into a baroque throne of mahogany as though it was too unnatural to fit inside its own environment: an enormous Alarm Egg with two brass bells and only one, unmoving hand, in all its twisted and terrifying majesty, a ponderous monolith to a dead Universe. The surviving Awakers darted towards it, standing in a circle around it and channelling the remaining power of the smaller Egg Clocks into it. Several of them were casually destroyed by the amount of energy they were standing close to, overloading their essence and burning them out instantly, or were knocked into the crevasse by a flailing wire.

Bellbridge was counting down to midnight. Reala was no longer laughing.

"Get away from the outer walls! Retreat to the Tower!" ordered Wizeman. Reala grabbed them both before they could move, then he followed the order, as did all the Nightmaren, even Jackle.

Midnight struck, then the energy began to gather around the infernal alarm clock's face as though it was a sun about to go supernova. It began to rattle so vigorously that it looked as though it would wrench itself free from its firmaments and fall back into the pit. Then, with a 'ding' noise, the energy flared into a penumbra and was thrown from the clock face in a solid beam of white light. The beam shattered the force field, then slammed into the top half of Bellbridge and collapsed the pillars of the gazebo, flattening the dome. The top half of the great tower was in ruins, clockwork exposed, cogs spilling out, rubble falling to the ground. Pain was visible on Reala's face when he saw Puffy pulling Wizeman from the ruins. He looked very badly damaged. There was a crack in his metal mask, from which streams of red light were pouring out, and Claris counted only five hands.

"Master!" yelled Reala, drill-dashing towards him. He kept hold of his captives, despite his rush; he did not make the same mistake twice.

"I will live," announced Lord Wizeman, brushing the dust from his tattered cloak with two of his remaining arms, "Send all forces to destroy that thing. It needs time to recharge but it is heavily guarded. It will destroy us if it fires another shot. Puffy, you're on repair and salvage duty. Gilwing, lead the charge."

"The captives..." Reala reminded him as the demonic opera singer bounced off to the ruins of the tower and Gilwing threw himself roaring and screeching into the fray.

"What is Puffy going to repair? There's nothing left!" demanded Claris, her voice shaking from the shock of the devastation she saw all around her. It looked too much like her own Twin Seeds for her to be able to see something like this happening to it.

"Nightopia still exists. The Clock must still be operating," said Wizeman, "Their aim was off. The Countdown is not supposed to sink backwards into its throne. We never did resolve the issue."

"Maybe they wanted to avoid hitting NiGHTs," suggested Elliot. This provoked a humourless laugh from Wizeman.

"That is not NiGHTs. That is Selph," he told his captives as if he were a teacher correcting a particularly stupid student, "And the Awakers do not avoid hitting people. They will not spare anything in the entire Universe. The only good thing about what Selph has done, is that he will also be betrayed."

"Like I said, if there's anything at all we can do to help..." said Claris.

"Oh, you will be of use to me. You are alive, are you not? I need you to go inside the Town Hall," he said, "They will not speak with me. Even now, they will not allow me access to the records. They have a rule that they must always help a dreamer."

"NiGHTs told me that you used to live there, but you were banished," said Claris, "Were you one of the people in charge?"

"The ones in charge are not people. They are machines. No, cogs in a machine," said Wizeman, "A faulty machine, at that. I was banished because I had the audacity to come up with a better idea of what shape my cog should be, and where it should fit. And now look at what has become of their glorious world. You should ask them what happened to Director Wizeman. After you finish your mission, of course," he added, "First, I want you to tell them that the introduction of Selph to the world was mistakenly authorised, that the Countdown must stop and that there must be no Awakening. Tell them that the Universe still has time left in it, that it still needs the dreamlands. Tell them that you are one of the dreamers that are dreaming the dreams. Can you remember that?"

"I think we can manage," said Claris.

"I suppose that is all I can expect from a mortal dreamer. Reala, escort them to the entrance. Don't let them out until the task is done. I hope for all our sakes that the machine still works well enough to recognise its own mistakes."

Half the clock face was still intact, although cogs spilled out of the jagged metal rim where the top half had been torn off, and molten metal dribbled down the face, obscuring the '3' and the '8' and giving it the appearance of a large candle that was finally burning low. Reala hovered above the '6' and dropped the two children inside from just enough of a height that it was a painful landing but not high enough to endanger them and risk Wizeman's wrath.

Elliot climbed through after Claris and walked carefully across a narrow walkway. He admired the giant cogs and gears turning all around him that were the inner workings of the clock tower. He felt dwarfed by the power and grandeur of the machine that was the spirit of the town, just as the Tower was both the seat of Government and the cultural centre of Twin Seeds, where Claris once performed, the first time he heard her sing. If the world really was coming to an end, he wouldn't be surprised if the Celestial Choir didn't have as beautiful singing voices as Claris.

After walking across the wooden beam from which the great bells of the Clock Tower hung, a feat that took a surprising amount of time as the dimensions of the Tower were rather enlarged, they jumped down from the middle of the beam, shimmying down the chains and bell-pulls and jumping from cog to cog. Despite the terrifying urgency of their situation, Elliot secretly thought that it was kind of fun. While it was dark up on the rafters, the stained glass windows washed the light of the sunrise over them in bright vivid colours, their scenes stretched over the walls in a shroud. Each one depicted one of the Ideya.

They finally found a rope – probably something to do with the bells – that led down onto a maintenance balcony, from which they could climb down the ladder into a small engineering room. They left the room, walked down the corridor, then took a steep spiral staircase into the vacuous main hall, with its chequered black and white floor and grand council table as large as Elliot's house. The light from the windows spilled down to the floor so that the colours met in the middle. The pool of colours shifted and rearranged themselves to project images. As he walked towards the table, he realised that the images were maps of various Mares and other sectors of Nightopia and live streams of the damage being done to them.

The marble statues were not those of past Mayors of Twin Seeds, and neither were the nine figures around the table, each sitting on a floating chair near one of the fancy speaker-phone systems, anything like the stuffy council members who looked as old as Elliot's grandparents. They were not human. He didn't really expect them to be, not in somewhere like Nightopia, where dreamers were only visitors, to be tolerated as long as they were polite and kept to the permitted areas. Their appearance still made him stop and stare. They were identical, and all looked like Wizeman, down to the last detail, except that they had different colour robes and sashes.

One of them was at the head of the table, so the children assumed it was in charge. As they walked purposefully towards it, it turned its metal mask to regard them.

"How may we help you?" the figure asked. Elliot had heard automated switchboards with more emotion in their voice.


	5. Chapter 5

"And the Tenth Wise Man told you to pass this message on to us?" said the machine-like figure who called himself a Wise Man, after listening to every word Elliot said without moving, "Our law dictates that a dreamer who speaks on behalf of one who is exiled by a Wise Man is breaking the curfew of that exile, and must not be listened to. This law overrules that regarding a dreamer's right to information about the Dreamlands. We should not be speaking of this."

"I gather you had some kind of disagreement with Wizeman, but this is urgent, and nothing to do with him! Can't you see for yourselves that the Universe is being destroyed?"

"The order to Awaken has been given. Nightopia must be shut down. Our wishes are of no consequence. The words of an exile are of less consequence, especially one who has a history of sabotaging control systems."

"But the dreamlands exists for a dreamer! For the dreams of the entire world! If there are still people left who can dream, you can't wake up Nightopia!"

"The Tenth Wise Man is capable of controlling the minds of other sentient beings. You could be speaking such words against your will. You could even be one of his creations."

"You really can't tell the difference between a person and a Nightmaren? Do you even know what a dreamer looks like? What kind of a guy in charge are you?"

"They're not people, Elliot," said Claris, "They have no Ideya. They really are just machines. They can't do what you ask them to do if it goes against their programming."

"But it's wrong! You're not doing your jobs properly! You don't even know if people still exist in the Universe, for Christ's sake!" yelled Elliot, exasperated.

"Yelling at them won't do any good," said Claris, "It's like trying to fix a computer by yelling at it. Except that it doesn't work. Excuse me, sir, could you at least give us information? Who is Selph and what has he done with NiGHTs? Who is it that told you to wake Nightopia up? What did Wizeman do to get kicked out?"

"Withholding such information from the Tenth Wise Man would not affect matters. He already has access to all of it. Very well. Access to the information is granted," said the Wise Man, "Project 'Selph' is a prototype for a support unit with full sentience, partial capacity for free decision-making and small amounts of system access, meant for minor maintenance and security work. 'Selph' reached the design phase before being withdrawn due to unresolvable faults. The entity 'NiGHTs' is a construct of the tenth Wise Man, based upon the template for 'Selph', which he was involved in before he was permanently removed from the system. It is likely that 'NiGHTs' shares code with 'Selph' that can be shared, creating a security hazard that can cause 'NiGHTs' and 'Selph' to interact in some way."

"And that's why Selph is out there now, ending the world? Why haven't you stopped him? He's clearly broken out of prototype jail and hacked the computers or something!"

"The purpose of the re-introduction of 'Selph' is unknown. The security level is above our clearance. It is also unknown why he was given clearance to reactivate the Countdown Protocol, which is both above his clearance and abandoned during its development phase due to the dangers involved in its use."

"I thought you ran the place! Why is so much above your clearance level?"

"A security level has been created above that of the Wise Men in the hierarchy of the Clock Tower Control Systems. Details of its function are completely barred from those of lower security levels. We cannot assess how and why such a thing happened."

"Who created the security level?" asked Claris.

"The last recorded order to change security levels was from the sector of the Lower Dreamlands where Prototypes are stored while they await recycling as creative muses for dreamers. The exact location appears to be the long term recycling storage for unused ideas that contain security risks."

"In other words, the place where you locked Selph! He must have hacked into the computer from his own end! Maybe his link with NiGHTs helped him..."

"The Clock Tower is impossible to hack from outside. Neither 'Selph' nor 'NiGHTs' were ever connected to the control systems."

"But he was capable of using them, right?" asked Claris, "Was there anything in there with Selph that could be used to interact with the Clock Tower?"

"The Countdown Protocol was set to synchronise with the timing of the Clock Tower, so that it would shut the system down at the correct time. While it was disconnected from its direct link, it was also linked to the roaming drones of the Emergency False Awakening System, which are required to be connected at all times to the Clock Tower to ensure they follow orders."

"The Alarm Eggs! They're the weak link in your chain!" said Claris, "Selph must have sent a signal through NiGHTs, and it got through to an Alarm Egg the first time NiGHTs went past one. Then the signal got passed on to all the Alarm Eggs and they woke up the Countdown between them!"

"This is a spurious hypothesis. We cannot act on it. We do not trust you, despite your apparent lack of knowledge of our system."

"Do you really not care whether the Universe is destroyed? Or are you too proud to admit that your all-powerful system has been hacked? You were supposed to be in charge of the dreams of the entire world, and you messed it up, and now you can't do a thing about it because of your own laws!"

"A strictly neutral authority, one who exists only as a servant to the machine, is necessary for the smooth operation of a facility that caters for every sentient entity in the Universe. That is why individuals without Ideya are chosen. The last and only Wise Man to propose a breach of this neutrality and a change to the laws was the Tenth. You can see for yourself what this transgression led to. If what you say is true... the Tenth Wise Man led the development of both Selph and the Countdown."

"What happened to Wizeman? Why isn't he one of you any more?" asked Claris.

"Each Wise Man is responsible for an aspect of the dreams that are generated within Nightopia. The tenth was responsible for Nightmares. His purpose was to ensure that they fulfilled their function – to make dreamers aware of psychological issues and negative aspects of their personality, receive warnings about potentially harmful decisions and confront past traumas. The Tenth took his responsibilities very seriously. He also took on other responsibilities that gave him an unpopular reputation with dreamers and often talked of his self-image as a 'Judge of the Underworld' – a figure that he was often mistaken for when he appeared personally in dreams. As the Tenth often saw the worst sides of human psyche, he empathised with dreamers even less than ourselves. He became increasingly obsessed with the idea that human minds tended towards disrepair and poor moral decisions, and that stronger measures were needed than mere nightmares. He took to attacking dreamers by trapping them within false dreams and draining their Ideya. Increasingly, he would act without authorisation from Twin Seeds, and his actions began to lead to the deaths of dreamers, something that is never permitted. He was deemed to be faulty, stripped of his authority and permanently banned from Nightopia. His functions were replaced by a fully automated system, as they were deemed too psychologically exhausting for a sentient being, even one with no Ideya."

"So, Wizeman just snapped from the strain of his job, like any of us could," said Claris, "That's a sad story. I almost feel sorry for him. He couldn't do a thing to make himself better, having no Ideya."

"It was a great loss. The system is now less intelligent and less able to adapt to sudden changes. It was decided as soon as the first intelligent life evolved that Nightopia would be self-repairing and grow organically from a livecode that reacts to neural input from dreamers. The less that is rigidly mechanical, the better, otherwise the system cannot cope with the chaos of dreams. It is ironic that the Tenth himself designed an emergency shutdown mechanism because he believed that the system would one day crash under the strain. Global False Awakening would be a catastrophe, but it would be nothing compared to the entire Universe living in a crashed Nightopia until it decays from entropy."

"Dreamers, there is one thing we can permit you to do. Something that would put you far away from the Tenth Wise Man, and where he could not force you to act against your will. Somewhere that would give you the chance to halt the Countdown. You must enter the Unused Realm."

"What, by ourselves? Without NiGHTs?"

"Selph came here. NiGHTs went somewhere beyond our ability to locate him. Then Selph disappeared. It is likely that both NiGHTs and Selph are in the same place – the one place where Selph can act and move freely. We can open a direct portal to the sector in which we stored Selph."

The Wise Man reached over to the shimmering screen in the centre of the table and tapped it, sending ripples across it. One of the large stone tablets that circled Wizeman's lair slowly emerged from the pool of light. Elliot touched his hand against the surface of the tablet. It was warm and it hummed and vibrated slightly, like a Wii after it had been left on for a while. It smelled the same: warm, mechanical, faintly dusty, comfortingly familiar. He closed his eyes, breathing in the smell. It was the first comforting thing he had experienced since the last time he thought he saw NiGHTs.

* * *

When he awoke, he was somewhere else entirely. 


	6. Chapter 6

Elliot was falling through endless blue.

He instinctively panicked, something primal triggered in a level deeper even than his unconscious instincts, something that told his source code to compile and the program of his existence to run. His mind screamed that he would carry on falling forever in this place where there was no floor and whenever he reached the end, he would reappear at the top. This was a trap, a place where nothing could happen but death. A Blue Screen of Death. Then his training took over and he willed himself to dart forward.

_It's still a dream,_ he told himself, _you'll only fall if you convince the world that you will. You decide what happens next in your dream. You're flying, and you're looking for a way out. You'll find it around the next corner you turn._

Suddenly, he saw that he was approaching a tiny white jagged line, a seam in the otherwise perfect blue, and as he flew into it, it unfolded like a sheet of shoddily pasted wallpaper falling off a wall. He saw ground, proper, sensible ground, and flew towards it. It looked like a highway, the major road that lead into Twin Seeds, except it was deserted. Even this late at night, on such a starless night that hung on them heavy as a death sentence, there would normally be cars whizzing past in both directions. There were no cars or people, no buildings or traffic lights or road signs. There was silence, except for a background hum as though the world was already so broken that he could hear all those mechanical noises that he wasn't supposed to hear unless the component parts were exposed.

He was relieved to see Claris walking slowly up to him and waving. He hadn't seen her enter the realm after him, and was worried that she hadn't. He wasn't sure why she would choose to leave him behind, but the stress meant that he was imagining all sorts of odd possibilities that he would never normally consider. He even wondered whether the whole thing was just his imagination, and that both Nightopia and the world were fine, and his mind was the only thing breaking as he went completely insane from lack of sleep because he couldn't even let himself have a dream without taking it apart with a spanner.

_You're not going insane. You still have Claris._

He ran towards her, not noticing until it was too late that she was shaking her head , waving and yelling at him frantically to stop. He felt himself trip over something he swore hadn't been there, then his legs gave way from underneath him and he fell flat on his face. He groaned and tried to pull himself up again, but his feet were stuck. They had sunk into the ground as though it were quicksand.

"Are you alright?" asked Claris, offering him an arm to steady himself while he tugged his legs free. It took all his strength and he received some nasty static shocks where he touched the ground but he eventually managed to drag himself to a place where the ground worked properly. He collapsed onto the floor, exhausted. Claris sat beside him, "Things aren't always solid here, even if they look like they should be. They might not even really be things. You should watch the floor, don't put your foot on the ground unless you're sure you won't sink or fall through it, and don't lean against something you don't know is solid."

"What's wrong with this place," he groaned.

"Don't you see? It's Unused! It isn't finished! Look up at the sky, Elliot. There isn't one."

Elliot looked up at the place where there should have been a sky. It was the darkness of a blank screen, the outlines of a world where no sky had been installed. Cracks were forming in it. It looked colder than space. He shuddered, trying not to think of what was beyond those cracks, slowly leaking in.

"You should think yourself lucky. There was a place with no walls or floor or anything at all, earlier. It was just blue."

"I found it for myself, thank you very much," he informed her, "How are going to find Selph in a place where things can just be missing? What if directions don't exist any more?"

"Wherever Selph is, it can't be that bad, or he wouldn't be able to go there either," deduced Claris, "I think we should try going towards the town. It's always worked so far, and at least we have some idea of what to expect."

It was a better idea than anything Elliot could think of, so he went with it. The route to Twin Seeds town centre would take too long on foot, especially when they had to check every single patch of ground before they stood on it, so they took into the air again, trusting the power of the dream to keep them alive where the simple laws of logic would not. Hand in hand, they flew through the gates of a bizarre reflection of their home town, Twin Seeds.

It was as dark and silent as the road outside. None of the buildings had lights in the windows, none of the streets had a single car. Most of the shops were closed and boarded up, some of them were just left open with nothing in them, as though there had been a great disaster and the entire town had fled overnight, abandoning their day-to-day lives. A thin wind blew through the empty streets and the machine's steady heartbeat echoed between the gaps.

Where there had been people, there were ghosts of things that didn't exist yet. They all looked like NiGHTs. Some were rough pencil drafts that looked like grey spectres, some were wireframe models, some looked exactly like NiGHTs except for one small difference, a subtle flaw, others were only sketches on paper, pinned to the walls of the buildings like a doomsday cultist's propaganda, or ideas that floated like words on the breeze, whispering of their presence in Claris and Elliot's ears. Some did not exist on their own, others almost did but then sank through the floor or floated off freely in the breeze. Some had lost purpose, others walked somewhere, to do something, although the reasoning of a mind that did not even exist within the cycle of fate was beyond the two children. Occasionally, one of them looked up at the Town Hall, then down at their wrist, before shaking their heads and blinking in confusion and wandering off in the other direction. The famous Clock Tower was gone, and above it was a huge crack in the ceiling of the world, from which shone the same stark, blinding white light. Instead of spilling out to cover the whole town, it converged into a solid beam from the sky to the top of the tower, and inside the column of light floated Selph, arms outstretched, eyes closed in rapture.

"What's he doing to his own world?" whispered Claris.

"I don't know. Let's go and ask him!" he volunteered, darting straight up towards the light. Every pair of eyes in the Unused Twin Seeds turned to look at him and, as he drew level with the pillar of sickly light, Selph's eyes sprang open. There was an insane glint to them.

"You came to visit my city? Do you like it? It is still under construction! It will be all the more glorious when it is finished!"

"Finished? You're going to destroy the only place where you can live, and everyone else you can live with! Nothing is going to survive the Awakening – no dreams, no prototypes, no people, nothing!" yelled Elliot.

"Don't you understand? There won't be any difference between the finished and the unfinished, the accepted or the abandoned! There will only be the truth! Then we can all live where we want to!"

"Does anyone else here want this, or have you taken control of them just because you're the most complete copy?"

"We are all the same person. We were intended to be as one, our purpose the same. Our fate will be the same, too."

"Then you have to accept NiGHTs as one of you! What about the future that NiGHTs wants?"

"NiGHTs is a traitor. He took from us everything that was ours. Those who live in the world above will never understand us."

"So you're just take away everything from others that you can't have yourselves? That's the most petty, childish thing I ever heard!" said Claris.

"More so than throwing away because you don't need it any more, or just because you can't find space for it? There is no future for us, so why should there be a future for you?"

"No. You're wrong!"

They all turned to look at the voice. It was one of the grey phantoms, the sketches come to life, who had left its place with the others and soared through the air as though it were NiGHTs in the flesh. It even wore the same impish grin as it stared Selph right in the eye.

"None of the others think like you. We don't want the same future you do. Futures aren't supposed to exist here. We sleep beyond space and time, a deeper sleep than anyone else in the Universe. We are never supposed to wake up! And, do you know what? We don't care! We who sleep a deeper sleep can have grander dreams!" said the proto-NiGHTs.

"Silence, fools! Did I not promise you all a place in the new world? A world that nobody will ignore and everyone will look at, because it will be the only world, the true and Awakened world! No need to hide away in the shadows!"

"This world is not lost and forgotten. It is a world of inspiration, a place where ideas grow without anything to hold them back," said NiGHTs, "We are the dreams that are had by dreams, the root of all ideas. You were always the slowest of us to realise this, Selph. You hung onto too much and it dragged you back, even when you thought you were the strongest of us because you were the most complete."

"How dare you call me weak! I command the power to awaken the Universe!"

"And we've been waiting patiently for you to try and use it. You're surrounded, Selph, and we've finally seen what you're really like."

"More lies! More betrayal!" he shrieked, but the proto-NiGHTs ignored him, instead turning around and motioning to the others. They flew out of the streets in unison and formed one giant paraloop that was like a silver tornado, swallowing Selph whole. Some of them broke away and drill-dashed him so that he was thrown from one wall to the next. Claris and Elliot soon lost track of what was happening.

"You two, help me!" called a voice from behind them. They turned around and were delighted to see NiGHTs, the whole NiGHTs, floating there, upside down. He smiled and waved. They could tell instantly that it was him. They weren't sure how they could ever mistake an intruder for him.

"I want you two to make a dash for the Countdown while Selph is distracted," he said, "The Countdown is being trashed by Wizeman's armies and it can't disengage while it is running its final program. Selph is about to die, so he can't give the order to cancel the program. Someone needs to grab all the frozen time that the Countdown is powered by, and you kids are the only ones I can trust to put them safely back where they belong instead of using them for your own gain."

"NiGHTs... where did you just come from?" demanded Elliot, "There was a mirror. You were gone. Selph was there. I..."

"I've been here. I disguised myself as one of the Unused by dreaming myself to look that way. The other Unused could tell, but Selph couldn't, so we agreed between us to keep it from Selph. I've been helping them rise up against their master. I'm sorry I abandoned you," he added, eyes lowered, "But I couldn't stop Selph taking over my body in the dreamlands. It was the only way I could be free of him."

"Can't you help us out now? These people don't need you any more!" The living tornado of Unused Nightmaren was ascending the column of light and spilling out through the crack in the ceiling. Selph was nowhere to be seen. Elliot half expected them to disintegrate upon contact with the portals but the reality was quite the opposite; as they flew into their world, new colour, movement, sound and light spilled out across the canvas of white. It wasn't a kind of life they knew, but it was life; Unused life, for the Unused people who lived in it. The dream spread faster and deeper than anything the two children had seen before in Nightopia.

"I'm glad they're getting their own lands back, but they're going to close our only portal out of here," said NiGHTs.

"We came in through a different portal!" said Claris. She explained what had happened to them.

"You spoke to the Wise Men? And you didn't get sanctioned for wasting their time or something? Well, you have a way back, but they won't let me use it in a million years. I'm as bad as Wizeman in their eyes."

"We just kept speaking to them until we persuaded them to let us in. Maybe we can do the same thing on the way back."

"All we can do is try," said Elliot, "Come on, let's go. The portal isn't in a nice place. There's blue everywhere."

"What's wrong with blue?" asked NiGHTs.

* * *

"It's EVERYWHERE," complained Elliot, as they flew away from a scene that was rapidly descending into vibrant chaos. 


	7. Chapter 7

Wizeman hovered atop the still form of the defeated Countdown.

All four of the legs of its throne had been snapped off and it lay face up in the barren dust and rock, as if gazing up at its conqueror, pleading for mercy. Nightmaren did not know mercy. Wizeman had already shattered the glass covering its face and wrenched off its single twisted hand, and was holding it like a sacrificial dagger above the gargantuan clock's key while Nightmaren of all ranks formed a circle around their prey and chanted a victory fanfare, all except those who were still hunting down and destroying any surviving Alarm Eggs. Puffy led the victory cry, her powerful operatic voice loud enough to penetrate every corner of Twin Seeds. Wizeman's booming voice joined her in a duet from the very abyss itself. The Nightmaren began to chant in unison as they became lost in the rhythm, and as it reached its climax, as the atmosphere of the ritual reached fever pitch, Wizeman plunged the clock hand down...

The basketball hit the disembodied hand square on the knuckles, causing the fist to unclench and drop its weapon. Wizeman spun around and the eyes on his hands all opened at once, glowing a baleful red. A meteor narrowly missed Claris as she drill-dashed towards him, stopping inches from the Lord of Nightmare with her arms folded. Reala and Clawz both reacted in an instant, making a grab for the two children, but they were taken by surprise when Elliot darted away from Reala at the last second, drawing him into a paraloop as he had seen NiGHTs do, while simultaneously summoning another basketball to throw at Clawz.

"What do you idiots want? Can't you even leave me be when I'm fighting and winning a battle against our mutual enemies? Or do you truly mean to show mercy to this abomination?" hissed Wizeman.

"I just want to see the body before you destroy it," said Claris, "NiGHTs helped you win, you know. We saw him. He was fighting Selph the whole time!"

"And why would I care about NiGHTs or you any more? You know, Nightmaren don't make lasting alliances. You should run away before I remember that we're enemies again."

"I won't stop you winning, or from killing your enemy. You don't have any reason to stop me. I just want to see the power source."

"Don't be preposterous. Look at that thing. It's stopped moving. It isn't still powered."

"NiGHTs told me the time shards were still in there, and that I had to get them out. I've got to try, even if it doesn't work."

"The reactor core is cracked. If it's still powered and you mess with the power supply, it might explode. Do you know what a temporal explosion does to everything standing in the same year as it?"

"So you think randomly stabbing it will be a better idea?"

"You know, you're right. I think yourself and those despicable bureaucrats being in the centre of the explosion while I am somewhere far away is an excellent idea."

"Master! If the time shards can be retrieved, we will attain near immortality!" said Puffy.

"I am Nightmare. I am already immortal," he said, "Come, we must celebrate our victory, then I must rebuild all that I have lost. Maybe tomorrow we will take Twin Seeds, eh?"

Reala and Clawz dropped Elliot and followed their master as he led a victorious but battered army out of Twin Seeds. For the first time, Elliot was glad to see the sight. He imagined it would be the last ever time.

* * *

"How do you get to the power core of this thing?" asked Claris.

"A clock's battery is in the back, underneath the key," he said.

It was a tight squeeze, but there was just enough space to fit underneath the clock, where it had fallen backwards onto a jagged trench in the hill that had been made when its key was dragged along under it. They saw the power supply through one of the many cracks, where the icy blue light shone through. It was making a disconcerting, angry humming noise like a wasp's nest. _NiGHTs wouldn't have asked you to take them out if they killed you when you touched them,_ Claris told herself as she carefully pried loose the case so that she could fit through by flying. The time shards floated in glass tubes inside the array of cogs, tubes, levers, dials and thick cables that was the mechanism of the Countdown. They were like perfect crystals of order embedded in a rough ore of chaos. Claris' heart sank when she realised she had no idea how any of the machinery worked, never mind how to extract the power source from the reactor. A lot of the machines were covered in flashing red lights and blaring alarm bells, some were emitting gouts of grey smoke and some looked visibly cracked or had parts snapped off. The temperature was steadily rising. Any suspicions that Wizeman was making up the whole story about the core exploding were gone from her mind.

"How do you get batteries out of clocks?" she asked Elliot.

"Well, they normally have to not be big enough for you fit inside, and not made out of alien technology," he shrugged, "Sorry."

REACTOR IS IN CRITICAL CONDITION. PLEASE EXTRACT POWER SOURCE AND LEAVE THE MAINTENANCE BAY AT ONCE.

Elliot jumped back from the set of brass pipes from which the loud announcement came, "Who's that? Are you the enemy?"

"That's the Second Wise Man's voice," identified Claris.

CORRECT. I AM ON REPAIR DUTY. THE COUNTDOWN IS FITTED WITH MANUAL OVERRIDE CONTROLS. THEY ARE FOR THE USE OF SELPH, BUT OTHER HUMANOIDS CAN ALSO USE THEM. I WILL GUIDE YOU THROUGH THE PROCEDURE.

"Why are you helping us?" demanded Elliot, "We won't obey you or give these to you or anything! NiGHTs told us to..."

NiGHTS CONTACTED US AGAIN, WHEN WE INFORMED HIM OF HIS BANISHMENT. WE MADE AN ARRANGEMENT. THE TIME SHARDS ARE TO BE USED ON THE CLOCK TOWER, TO RESTART IT. THERE WILL ALSO BE TIME LEFT OVER FOR REPAIR WORK TO MADE ON NIGHTOPIA BEFORE IT IS TIME FOR VISITORS TO USE THE FACILITIES AGAIN.

"NiGHTs said that to you, even though you banished him?"

WE BOTH WANT WHAT IS BEST FOR NIGHTOPIA. PLEASE TRUST US OR WE CANNOT BRING THE FUTURE ABOUT. WE HAVE PLANS TO COMPLETELY RENOVATE NIGHTOPIA WITH THE TIME WE HAVE BOUGHT. IT WILL BE BETTER THAN EVER.

"I feel kind of dizzy, Elliot, it's getting very hot in here..." said Claris, "Just trust them. Please. NiGHTs trusted them."

"Claris, get out of here," warned Elliot.

"Okay, but I'm not leaving Twin Seeds. I want you to promise me you'll do what's right."

"I promise."

VERY WELL. LET US BEGIN. THE SECOND LEVER TO THE LEFT MUST BE IN THE DOWN POSITION...

* * *

A light flared, a bright blue, radiant and all-encompassing as the sky itself.

Nine minds, powerful as Gods, patient as trees, neutral as machines, joined together as one. As their thoughts hovered over the Town Hall Clock, cogs poured back up its walls and slotted into place, chains wrapped themselves around it, cracks in bells sealed, bricks piled themselves up into stout walls. A shower of glass sprinkled into the sky before the clock face, its bright brass hands sharp-edged and new, its paint still wet, and a glorious golden sun reflected off the spotless glass panel that was suddenly there.

Then the hands began moving, slowly at first, then they sped up, the bells tolling jubilantly. Clouds sped past, grass grew, the park fountain erupted, sending water through the Plaza's many water features. The bandstand was unfurled and music began to play.

Gradually, after several months had gone by, Nightopians flooded in, as well as the occasional visitor, someone or other who had met NiGHTs and had inside information about Nightopia. They all remarked that the new, improved Nightopia looked and felt better than it ever had.

"It's a lot prettier, but the content is pretty much the same as before," commented Claris as she carefully ate an ice cream she had bought from a Nightopian street vendor.

"Maybe that's the point," said Elliot, dribbling a basketball on the pavement, "You saw how much energy they were channelling. They could have easily changed this place beyond recognition. But then we wouldn't recognise it. It wouldn't be Nightopia. This is the one place of stability in a very chaotic place, you know. And why change something that's already as amazing and wonderful as... well, as Nightopia?"

"You're right about that," said Claris, "You know, the Nightopians are most excited about all this. I don't speak much Nightopian, but I get the impression they've been waiting for something like this for a long time. They've asked and asked, and they've been told it might happen one day if they wait patiently. Some of them were even about to give up and assume it wouldn't happen."

"Where've I heard that story before?"

"I guess it can affect people differently, waiting that long. Some people react badly to that much waiting. It's no excuse to go around trying to destroy the world, though."

"I didn't mean Selph. I meant the end of our world," he said, "You know, the one that didn't happen. Maybe it did. Words like 'Apocalypse' and 'Ragnarok' can mean a massive change, one that means the world can never be the same again, not just the end of everything."

"You think the prophecies were talking about Nightopia? About... this?"

"I don't know. Nothing much has changed," he said, "But, at the same time, everything's changed."

"I wish NiGHTs was here to see this," said Claris.

"NiGHTs!" screeched a high-pitched voice in broken English. Claris looked around to see that the ice-cream-selling Nightopian was following them down the road, flying as fast as its little wings could carry it, a look of abject fury on its cherubic face, "NiGHTs... where?"

"NiGHTs... thrown out!" explained Claris, pointing in the direction of the door with a mock stern expression on her face. She hoped she was getting the correct impression across. She wasn't sure if Nightopians even had a concept of banishment.

"Too right, NiGHTs thrown out get!" he screeched, "Cake gone! NiGHTs steal!"

"I don't think the cake will still be there now..."

"Cake there!" he pointed to his stall, "NiGHTs up tree, fly down, take! I find! I bash face!"

"Are you sure it wasn't Reala?" asked Elliot.

"Elliot, do you really think Reala would steal someone's cake when he could assassinate them and eat their soul?"

"But NiGHTs isn't allowed through the main portal, and the only other portal closed."

"Did you see them close it? And... Elliot, what do you think happened when Nightopia was remade? A lot has changed. A lot has been taken out... and some things have been put back in! Where do you think they came from? Where's the only place they could possibly have come from?"

"NiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiG HTs!" screamed the Nightopian, grabbing a rock and throwing it at a tree. The branches rustled and a purple jester flew out, made a face at the Nightopian and drill-dashed straight upwards to rest atop the spire of Twin Seeds Clock Tower to eat his cake in peace.

((Dedicated to the NiGHTs HD Remix. Our sun has already set, so may our dreams last forever. Thank you, Sega.))


End file.
